permaculture

[John Schinnerer <JohnS@STLabs.com>]

Aloha,

Great questions!

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul and Sandra [SMTP:crows@tkc.att.ne.jp]
        >...What are the tools of social and personal power that are learned
not through the >curriculum, but through the actual social power structures
of a typical grade school?

        Off the top of my head & experience:  passivity, uniformity,
hierarchy; deference/obedience to arbitrary authority ('might makes right');
suppression of emotionings, individuality, creativity; arbitrary
regimentation (time, age, gender, space); separation of functional wholes
into non-functional parts (to quote Gregory Bateson, "Break the patterns
that connect the elements of learning and you necessarily destroy all
quality.").  There's much more, of course, but that's enough for now...
>  
        >...What does permaculture look like in education?  Has anyone seen
models?  Has anyone >seen site analysis?  Has anyone seen designs?  I have
seen a few examples of salad >dressing and installed one ongoing projects
myself.  Are their outreach programs for >schools?  What about accessing
teacher trainings?  What about permaculture club along >side the Junior
Statesmen of America.  What an amazing microcosm for urban >permaculture, a
much needed expansion of a movement which tends to neglect the broad >belly
of the beast if favor of a personal rural get away.  

        In a heady vein, I'm thinking along the lines of "what might
'education' look like if designed using permaculture principles?"  If I
understand you correctly, part of your question is about that and part is
about plugging permaculture ideas into existing 'education'?  This latter is
certainly a good idea, but I wouldn't stop there or I might get stuck (see
Bateson quote above).  I ponder "is it possible to 'grow' permaculture using
non-permaculture?"  Getting permaculture "units" and "sound bites" into
current forms of 'education' or 'media' does not alter those underlying
patterns of disconnected "units" and "sound bites," for example.

        In a more practical vein - at Hilo High School in Hilo, Hawai'i,
there is a mini-ag program where students do hands-on work, often with
traditional Hawaiian staple crops and systems.  There is an "alternative
school" a bit north of Hilo where the kids do even more of this sort of
thing - they partly feed themselves on what they grow and as far as I know
spend a lot more time hands-on, including integration of normally divided
'subjects'.  A teacher friend of mine whose 'subject' is math drags in all
kinds of real-world connections to 'teach' math - his kids learn statistics
using AIDS data, and scale and proportion and so on while designing
outrigger canoe models that they actually build.  Another friend, a CSAP
counselor, took a group of her kids to Kaho'olawe to work with the
restoration efforts - which could and may already be benefiting from
permaculture methods...and in all the above examples, there is a strong
cultural thread for the participants in that the places, the plants and the
methods and systems emerge or re-emerge from re-coalescing cultural roots.
To me, anything that re-integrates what has been separated is valuable and
'permaculture-like' in its potential to shift the underlying culture.

        John Schinnerer